I'm new around here and many of these things are new to me. I stumbled upon this site today, looking for some specific solution to a problem and instead found a whole lot more. There's so much information here, I spent a good part of today morning reading blogs and people's experiences. It made me realise I wasn't alone. It helped me step outside of myself and see things more clearly.

I'd like to share my story. There are some good parts and some bad parts but I want to share them all. Reading other's experiences here has helped me. I need some advice and I've seen how people who share their experiences gain from it. And I hope that sharing mine might perhaps help somebody too even though I'm no pro at this, we've only just started being poly about two years ago.

I'm not much of a talker when it comes to sharing close emotional feelings, expectations, desires or boundaries. I've been trying to change that for a long time and I have made some serious progress, but I also still have difficulty doing it. It's more difficult if I have to talk to my primary partner about what I want from another partner or talk to my other partner about my boundaries. It makes me feel uncomfortable. Why? Because I think I will hurt their feelings? Because I'm afraid of being denied what I want? Or because I'm not sure of what I want in the first place and think it's better to just 'see what happens'? I think it's cocktail of reasons. But I've realised time and again, that not talking makes it worse. I like the way somebody described these talks in a post I read today: "Kinda like putting up warning signs and detour routes for the the road that washed away 1 mile ahead. If all the warnings are ignored, you find your self in need of a tow truck to get your self out of the mess." True.

I think I should start the story from the beginning. Since the beginning was around 11 years ago, I'm afraid this is going to be a long post.

I'm 27 now. I've only been in love twice. My first relationship went on for 4 years before we split because we moved to different countries. My second one, seven years and counting. I'm not married, but the girl I'm with now is the one I want to spend my life with. I went from one relationship to the next pretty quickly, in a matter of three or so months and during which I wasn't seeing/dating/having sex with any body else. It started simple enough, flirting, fooling about. And before we knew it, we were in love.

That's about 11 years combined. I cheated on my girlfriends many times. Yes, I lied and I cheated. I'm not proud of it. My ex girlfriend still doesn't know everything. I had cheated on and lied to my current girlfriend Nisha too. Every time I did it I felt weak, guilty, like a terrible person. But I couldn't control myself. I loved Nisha then and love her now. And I love sex. I want it from her and others. I want it so much that I'm week when offered. I had affairs. I wanted to and tried to treat everybody respectfully. But sometimes I failed. Sometimes I lied to get into bed or out of trouble. Sometimes I did things I regretted very heavily the next day. The guilt was terrible.

I love sex, I'm a slut and I'm not ashamed of it. Not anymore. Once I considered being a slut a bad thing, I felt guilty and wrong. I don't anymore. Now what I am ashamed of is being an unethical one.

When Nisha and I were together, we wanted to see/fuck new people. Which we thought was only possible if we broke up. So we broke up. But then we couldn't bear not being together so we got back. And it went like this, off and on, again and again, breaking and patching. The last time I cheated on her and confessed, I finally confessed to everything, all the past times that I had lied about, the whole truth and I was very ashamed of what I had done and very, very, scared. I had never seen her that hurt and angry before. Her trust was shattered. She left me and it was an very horrible time. Things seemed irreparable.

But something happened after that. While we weren't together, Nisha met someone who was poly and married. I won't get into the details here because it involves other people's privacy but what matters is that this led to a series of events which opened our minds to whole new possibilities. Polyamory. At first we weren't sure of how it would work, but we gave it a try. It was amazing. Instead of taking us further apart, it brought us closer together than we'd ever been before. Our love grew immensely.

We spoke openly, me for the first time without shame or guilt. We had long conversations. Her insecurities gradually lessened. My fears of not being accepted slowly lessened. It was hard at first and we had a tough time getting through it. But we stuck to it, we were brutally honest and accepted each other. We voiced our desires and respected each others boundaries. Our trust slowly mended and our love grew incredibly. She trusted me, my love. She knew that I would always be there for her and I knew she would be there for me. We were very happy together again. We had passionate sex again, together, with others and together with others.

But things aren't always so easy going. Things aren't always so easy to do. Emotions aren't easy to control and somethings, things get out of hand. And things did go out of hand very recently, when Nisha and I stayed over at my other partner's house while on holiday. Initially it's something that I didn't want to do but we didn't have a hotel booked and it was convenient. But I guess we bit off more than we could chew. A lot of things went wrong. I guess I got caught up in what they call NRE and that made me blind to how Nisha was feeling or being treated. We hit bumps we didn't see coming. Insecurities and fears resumed. And our holiday pretty much feels like just a waste of time, money and energy right now.

In fact, this holiday is the reason why I started looking online for help. And what I wanted to share here was what happened during this holiday but I couldn't do so without first explaining how we got there. I'll share the rest of my story soon but I've written a lot for now and need to take some time to process things firstů